Adrian Walker

First, a confession: I haven't read an Adrian Walker column in months. Somebody tell me if I've missed anything. But Mike Durant posts today that Walker talked to Menino, who admitted that this whole branch closing thing isn't really about money after all, so I wanted to take a look.

And I promptly remembered why I stopped reading Walker - Why waste my time on a bloviator who writes stuff like the following?

Fighting the closings had brought together a group of activists from across the city. But the truth is that the branches, some of them, are more popular when they are under siege than they are on a daily basis. If there really is a strong argument that Allston-Brighton’s three libraries cannot possibly be two, no one has made it.

Maybe, Adrian, if you'd actually showed up at any of the hearings on the proposed cuts, you'd have heard people make just those arguments. But that would have meant getting out of your comfy desk chair on Morrissey Boulevard and mixing with actual library users, instead of just chatting with your pal the mayor on the phone.

Yesterday, Kevin Cullen declared Boston the Worst City in the World because we haven't seen fit to temporarily rename a street after some rock band that played here once. Hey, Kevin, I'm personally outraged there's no plaque commemorating the time the seminal rock band the B-52s played the Orpheum back in the early 1980s, whom can I call, and can I count on your support?

Today, Adrian Walker does one of his patented rewrite jobs and explains that a) There's a big hole in the middle of Downtown Crossing, b) Tom Menino refused to walk by it the other day and c) The city's in a heap of financial trouble. Absolutely none of which we'd read in any Globe stories over the past week, right?

First Dianne Wilkerson and her Dejavu story. Now Walker reports he - and many other people - were had by Jake Severino, a bright young Dorchester man who, it turns out, is not dying of cancer like he told Walker he was back in September.

Jake Severino had a simple explanation for why he started telling the world he was dying. "I wanted to be loved," he said. "I wanted to be loved more than I was."

Michael Pahre wonders why the feds waited until now to nab Wilkerson - since based on that affidavit, they had her cold last year. Are more dominoes about to fall? If so, Pahre predicts the next to go is Boston Licensing Board Chairman Daniel Pokaski - painted in a particularly unflattering way in the affidavit:

... BLB Chairman Pokaski will probably resign within weeks -- if not days -- because he stood to gain financially from the August 2007 meeting that allegedly resulted in him approving a temporary license for Dejavu while the state legislature approved a pay raise for him. ...

Meanwhile, Pahre raises an issue about the Globe: In all its wall-to-wall coverage in print today, the Globe made absolutely no mention of the role played in all this by its own Adrian Walker. Is the paper embarrassed the feds painted its columnist as a patsy used by Wilkerson to help blackmail the city council and Pokaski to get her client his liquor license?

It's not like Walker didn't want to write about the case. Yesterday, boston.com posted his musings. But after two paragraphs generically writing about his July column, Walker spent the rest of the piece sighing about what a shame Wilkerson had become. What did Wilkerson say to him to convince him to write that July column? We have no idea.